"Twenty years," he said, with tears of anger in his eyes, "twenty years I have crossed the Atlantic, but this is the first time that I ever heard the like. Good God, sirs! it's nothing less than piracy on the high seas; and they shall swing, every man Jack of them, as high as Haman! What think ye? They signal me to lie to—me that has the mails and a hundred thousand pounds in specie aboard; they fire a shot across my bows, and when I signal that I'll see them in hell before I bate a knot, why—you watched it yourselves—they struck me in the fo'castle, and there's two of my dead men below now; but they shall swing"—and he brought his fist upon the table with a mighty thud—"they shall swing, if there's only one rope in Europe."
I had sorrow for the man who was thus moved—for the most part, I could see, at the loss of his two men. Then I went forward with the others to the place of wreckage, and for the first time in my life I observed the colossal havoc which a shell may leave in its path. The single shot which had struck the steamer had cut her two skins of steel as though they had been skins of cheese: had splintered the wood of the men's bunks, so that it lay in match-like fragments which a fine knife might have hewed; had passed again through the steel on the starboard side, and so burst, leaving the fo'castle one tumbled mass of torn blankets, little rags of linen, fragments of wood, of steel, of clothes which had been in the men's chests; and, more horrible to recount, particles of human flesh. Three men were below when the crash came, and two of them had their limbs torn apart; while, by one of the miracles which oft attend the passage of a shot, the third, being in a low bunk when the shell struck, escaped almost uninjured. This desolate and wrecked cabin was shown to us by Captain Ross, whose anger mounted at every step.
"What does it mean?" he kept asking. "Are we at war? You saw the Chilian flag. Is there no Treaty of Paris, then? Does he go out to filch every ship he meets? Will he do this, and our Government take no steps? Can't you answer me that?" But he poured out his questions with such rapidity, and he was so overcome, that we followed him in silence as he walked beneath the awnings of the upper decks, and showed us women still talking hysterically, men unnerved and witless as children, seamen yet finding curses for the atrocity that had been. By this time, the first of the American ships had come up with us, and the commander of her put out a boat, and having gone aboard the maimed cruiser, he came afterwards to the Black Anchor ship, and joined us in the chart-room. I will make no attempt to set down for you his surprise nor his incredulity. I believe that the scene in the fo'castle alone convinced him that we were not all raving madmen; but, when once he grasped our story, he was not a whit behind us, either in intensity of expression or of sympathy.
"It's an international question, I guess," he said; "and if he doesn't pay with his neck for the twenty men dead on my cruiser, to say nothing of the twenty thousand pounds or more damage to her, I will—why, we'll run her down in four-and-twenty hours. You took his course?"
"West by south-west, almost dead," said the captain; and I heard it agreed between them that the second cruiser of the American fleet should start at once in pursuit, while the iron-clads should accompany us to New York, so making a little convoy for safety's sake.
With this arrangement we left the ship and regained the Celsis. Paolo stood at the top of the ladder as I came on deck, and listened, I thought, to our protestations that the danger was over with something of a sneer on his face.
Indeed, I thought that I heard him mutter, as he went to his cabin, "Vedremo—" but I did not know then how much the laugh was to be against us, and that we should leave the convoy long before we reached New York.
CHAPTER X.
THE SPREAD OF THE TERROR.
For full five days we steamed with the other vessels, under no stress to keep the sea with them, since they made no more than twelve knots, for the sake of the cruiser which had been so fearfully maimed in the short action with the nameless ship. During this time there was little power of wind; and the breeze continuing soft from the north-east, it was easy business to hold sight of the convoy, which we did to the satisfaction of every man aboard us. But I could not put away from myself the knowledge that the events of the first three days had made much talk in the fo'castle and that a feeling akin to terror prevailed amongst the men.
This came home to me with some force on the early morning of the fifth day. I found myself unable to sleep restfully in my bunk, and went above at daybreak, to see the white hulls of the American war-vessels a mile away on the port-quarter and the long line of the Black Anchor boat a few cables'-lengths ahead of them. Paolo was on the bridge, but I did not hail him, thinking it better to give the man few words until we sighted Sandy Hook. He, in turn, maintained his sullen mood; but he did not neglect to be much amongst the hands, and his intimacy with them increased from day to day.
Now, when I came on deck this morning, I found that the breeze, strong and fresh though it was, put me in that soporific state I had sought unavailingly in my bunk. There was a deck-chair well placed behind the shelter of the saloon skylight, and upon this I made myself at ease, drawing my peaked hat upon my eyes, and getting the sleep-music from the swish of the sea, as it ran upon us, and sprinted from the tiller right away to the bob-stay. But no sleep could I get; for scarce was I set upon the chair when I heard Dan the other side of the skylight, and he was holding forth with much fine phrase to Roderick's dog, Belle.
"Yes," he said, apparently treating the beast as though possessed of all human attributes. "Yes, you don't go for to say nothing, but you're a Christian dog, I don't doubt; and yer heart's in the right place; or it's not me as would be wasting me time talking to yer. Now, what I says is, you're comfortable enough, with Missie a-makin' as much of yer as if good fresh beef weren't tenpence a pound, and yer mouth warn't large enough to take in a hundredweight; but that ain't the way with the rest of us—no, my old woman, not by a cable's-length; we're afloat on a rum job, old lady; and some of us won't go for to pipe when it's the day for payin' off—not by a long way. So you hear; and don't get answerin' of me, for what I spoke's logic, and there's an end of it."
I called him to me, and had it out with him there and then.
"What's in the wind now, Dan," I asked, "that you're preaching to the dog?"
"Ay, that's it," he replied, putting his hand into his pocket for his tobacco-box. "What's in the wind?—why, you'd have to be askin' of it to learn, I fancy."
"Is there any more nonsense amongst the men forward?"
"There's a good deal of talk—maybe more than there should be."
"And what do they talk about? Tell me straight, Dan."
"Well, I've got nothing, for my part, to hide away, and I don't know as they should have; but you know this ship is a dead man's!"
"Who told you that stuff?"
"No other than our second mate, sir, as sure as I cut this quid. Not as yarns like that affect me; but, you see, some skulls is thick as plate-armour, and some is thin as egg-shells: and when the thin 'uns gets afloat with corpses, why, it's a chest of shiners to a handspike as they cracks—now, ain't it?"
"Dan, this is the most astounding story that I have yet heard. Would you make it plainer? for, upon my life, I can't read your course!"
He sat down on the edge of the skylight—long service had given him a claim to familiarity—and filled his pipe from my tobacco-pouch before he answered, and then was mighty deliberate.
"Plain yarns, Mister Mark, is best told in the fo'castle, and not by hands upon the quarter-deck;